Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/299

 stranger, even passing him on the street, instinctively felt the presence of a great man. His portrait in the Law School, like those of Parsons and Washburn, is vouched for by men who sat under him as an excellent likeness. He was of high breeding, inflexible honesty, constant hospitality, strong religious convictions, and sometimes confessed in private to a passionate love for the British poets. His blunt, outspoken sincerity rivalled that of President Lord, of Dartmouth College fame, to whom it is said he once exclaimed, in the heat of an argument, “Sir, this modern education is all a humbug”; and who instantly replied, with great heartiness, “Judge Parker, I know it is.”

If Parsons was suaviter in modo, Parker was fortiter in re. Polemics were his delight. A good stand-up fight was meat and drink to him, and he entered it with a genuine “neck-or-nothing,” “never-say-die” relish. For spicy reading, and at the same time for an excellent history of the Law School, there are few articles better than a pamphlet he published in reply to some criticisms on the school, which appeared in one of the law reviews of the time. His intense conservatism, which brought him into unpopularity during the Civil War, is seen in the following anecdote by Governor Chamberlain (LL.B. 1864) of South Carolina: